Sensor networks are typically unattended because of their deployment in hazardous, hostile or remote environments. This makes the problem of conserving energy at individual sensor nodes challenging. S-MAC and PAMAS are two MAC protocols which periodically put nodes (selected at random) to sleep in order to achieve energy savings. Unlike these protocols, we propose an approach in which node duty cycles (i.e sleep and wake schedules) are based on their criticality. A distributed algorithm is used to find sets of winners and losers, who are then assigned appropriate slots in our TDMA based MAC protocol.

We introduce the concept of energy-criticality of a sensor node as a function of energies and traffic rates. Our protocol makes more critical nodes sleep longer, thereby balancing the energy consumption.

Security in sensor networks is more important than traditional networks as they are deployed in hostile environments and are more prone to capture. Trusted third party authentication schemes, public-key systems are not suitable owing to their high resource requirements. Key pre-distribution was introduced in to solve this problem. Our scheme achieves identical connectivity compared to the random key pre distribution using a less number of preloaded keys in each sensor node.

Our proposed key pre-distribution scheme is based on assigning keys to sensors by placing them on a grid. This approach has been further modified to use multiple mappings of keys to nodes. In each mapping every node gets distinct set of keys which it shares with different nodes. The key assignment is done such that, there will be keys in common between nodes in different sub-grids. After randomly being deployed, the nodes discover common keys, authenticate and communicate securely. The analysis and simulation results show that this scheme is able to achieve better security compared to the random schemes.